Terry Grimley finds Christopher Le Brun's work hard to like in a major exhibition at Walsall's New Art Gallery.
Of all the British artists who built a reputation during the revival of figurative painting in the 1980s, Christopher Le Brun is one of the most perplexing.
His work has always struck me as fantastically and self-evidently bad, but clearly others take a different view since his national and international success continues to grow. For instance, he is one of the artists who have just been shortlisted to design the so-called Angel of the South.
Admittedly my opinion of Le Brun's work was until now based on a relatively limited range of images, mostly seen in reproduction. But now there is a chance to see it in bulk, with a major exhibition spread across all four floors of the New Art Gallery in Walsall.
The gallery's director Stephen Snoddy says this isn't a retrospective, but it does include work dating from the early 1980s to 2007, and it ranges through drawing, sculpture and printmaking as well as painting. The top floor has a casually-laid out display of sketches and maquettes of the kind usually to be seen on the walls of an artist's studio.
Le Brun's work walks a tightrope between abstract and figurative. A typical canvas contains vague forms of murky colour out of the centre of which, after a moment, you notice a horse's white head and foreleg emerging. This mixing of abstraction and representation evidently provoked some initial scepticism about Le Brun's work (as he acknowledges in an interview in the catalogue) and I have to confess that for me it's still a sticking-point.
Perhaps I should own-up to a modernist prejudice in feeling that Le Brun is mixing oil and water. Without wishing to get too bogged down in the theories of modernism, there is a history of fierce debate in the mid-20th century about abstraction and pictorial space, centred around the American critic Clement Greenberg and his argument that the flatness of the picture surface should be respected.
Actually British abstract painters were often attracted to the ambiguity of pictorial space - as in the landscape-inspired abstracts of Peter Lanyon, for example, or the work of Birmingham-born, New York-based John Walker, whose work has some parallels with Le Brun's.
But Le Brun, who recalls attending a lecture by Greenberg and is acutely aware of the arguments, simply shortcuts them by placing figurative elements into otherwise abstract canvases.
Though uncomfortable, this strategy could conceivably be made to work through sheer force of personality. But Le Brun's endlessly repeated motifs - the horse, a shield and a lonely tower - attempt to flog new life out of a musty repertoire of late romantic claptrap.
The most astonishing group of works here, dating from between 2000 and 2006, is a series of entirely figurative paintings including twilit landscapes and paintings of a knight in armour on horseback, often with a forest and a castle tower.
Knights in armour haven't really figured in British art since the late Victorian period, and while one picture in which the figure is entangled in briars inevitably calls Burne-Jones to mind, the sludgy colour and laboured technique is more reminiscent of G F Watts.
But actually this imagery seems to owe more to German romantic painting of the late 19th century, as titles like Tristan and Gurrelieder might suggest. The landscapes might have come straight from the exhibition Kingdom of the Soul, which was devoted to the period a few years ago. Digging out the catalogue I was amazed to register for the first time how obsessed with the symbolism of horses these artists were, and the kinship between Le Brun's work and that of Hans von Marées in particular is striking.
The best works in this show tend to be the most abstract. The aforementioned Tristan, for example, is a huge dipytch which might depict a primeval German forest at night since there is little that can be read in it apart from glimmers of light at top left and bottom right. But its tarry blackness has a tangible, physical quality that is quite impressive.
Similarly, the equally large Tirra Lirra, made up of six largely abstract canvases, though not entirely horse-free, is less maddeningly repetitious than much of what is here.
In recent paintings, and one of a group of small bronze sculptures, Le Brun plays with some spikey forms that recall modernist sculpture of the late 1940s. He has also tried to make paintings from start to finish in a single day without reworking, which is not an obvious improvement.
The painting he produced on July 7 last year (thereby earning the satisfying title 07.07.07.) vaguely reminded me of Patrick Heron's early paintings. It's almost as though after 25 years Le Brun has reached the point at which some important postwar British careers, like those of Heron and Eduardo Paolozzi, started off.
As well as occupying the top floor, main exhibition galleries and the ground floor window, Le Brun's work also turns up thematically integrated within the Garman-Ryan Collection. Also worth hunting out among the Garman-Ryan exhibits is a small but crucial exhibition called Hard Labour.
It's a rather randomly-assorted collection of pieces illustrating life and work in and around Walsall and the wider Black Country. Since this was a subject of little commercial scope for professional artists, it's not surprising that several of the contributors are evidently quite obscure, with dates of birth and death unknown in some cases.
Relatively recent contributors include the photographer Gary Kirkham and Walsall painter Andrew Tift who each in contrasting styles reflect the death of traditional industries and skills.
Most exciting, though, are three works by the early 20th century Black Country artist Edwin Butler Bayliss. There is a small oil showing how literally black the Black Country landscape was at the beginning of the 20th century, relieved only by some flicks of tangerine flame, a small but virtuosic watercolour of the interior of a foundry and a sturdy drawing of miners operating a winch.
In reviewing Behind Closed Doors at the Barber Institute only a couple of weeks ago I wrote that a definitive Bayliss exhibition was well overdue. After seeing these three works, it seems even more so.
* Christopher Le Brun is on view until March 30; Hard Labour until May 11 at the New Art Gallery, Walsall (Tue-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 12 noon-5pm; admission free).
